This Universe is good not when the individual is a stone, but when everyone throws in his own voice towards a total harmony, singing out a life- thin, harsh, imperfect, though it be.The Syrinx does not utter merely one pure note; there is a thin obscure sound which blends in to make the harmony of Syrinx music: the harmony is made up from tones of various grades, all the tones differing, but the resultant of all forming one sound.
Similarly the Reason-Principle entire is One, but it is broken into unequal parts: hence the difference of place found in the Universe, better spots and worse; and hence the inequality of Souls, finding their appropriate surroundings amid this local inequality.The diverse places of this sphere, the Souls of unequal grade and unlike conduct, are wen exemplified by the distinction of parts in the Syrinx or any other instrument: there is local difference, but from every position every string gives forth its own tone, the sound appropriate, at once, to its particular place and to the entire plan.
What is evil in the single Soul will stand a good thing in the universal system; what in the unit offends nature will serve nature in the total event- and still remains the weak and wrong tone it is, though its sounding takes nothing from the worth of the whole, just as, in another order of image, the executioner's ugly office does not mar the well-governed state: such an officer is a civic necessity;and the corresponding moral type is often serviceable; thus, even as things are, all is well.
18.Souls vary in worth; and the difference is due, among other causes, to an almost initial inequality; it is in reason that, standing to the Reason-Principle, as parts, they should be unequal by the fact of becoming separate.
We must also remember that every Soul has its second grade and its third, and that, therefore, its expression may take any one of three main forms.But this point must be dealt with here again: the matter requires all possible elucidation.
We may perhaps think of actors having the right to add something to the poet's words: the drama as it stands is not perfectly filled in, and they are to supply where the Author has left blank spaces here and there; the actors are to be something else as well; they become parts of the poet, who on his side has a foreknowledge of the word they will add, and so is able to bind into one story what the actors bring in and what is to follow.
For, in the All, the sequences, including what follows upon wickedness, become Reason-Principles, and therefore in right reason.
Thus: from adultery and the violation of prisoners the process of nature will produce fine children, to grow, perhaps, into fine men;and where wicked violence has destroyed cities, other and nobler cities may rise in their place.
But does not this make it absurd to introduce Souls as responsible causes, some acting for good and some for evil? If we thus exonerate the Reason-Principle from any part in wickedness do we not also cancel its credit for the good? Why not simply take the doings of these actors for representative parts of the Reason-Principle as the doings of stage-actors are representative parts of the stage-drama?
Why not admit that the Reason-Principle itself includes evil action as much as good action, and inspires the precise conduct of all its representatives? Would not this be all the more Plausible in that the universal drama is the completer creation and that the Reason-Principle is the source of all that exists?
But this raises the question: "What motive could lead the Logos to produce evil?"The explanation, also, would take away all power in the Universe from Souls, even those nearest to the divine; they would all be mere parts of a Reason-Principle.
And, further- unless all Reason-Principles are Souls- why should some be souls and others exclusively Reason-Principles when the All is itself a Soul?
THIRD TRACTATE.
ON PROVIDENCE (2).
1.What is our answer?
All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts- strictly "included" for this Universal Idea does not engender them but encompasses them.
The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul;its parts [i.e., events good and evil] are expressions of these Soulparts.
This unity, Soul, has different parts; the Reason-Principles, correspondingly, will also have their parts, and so, too, will the ultimates of the system, all that they bring into being.
The Souls are in harmony with each other and so, too, are their acts and effects; but it is harmony in the sense of a resultant unity built out of contraries.All things, as they rise from a unity, come back to unity by a sheer need of nature; differences unfold themselves, contraries are produced, but all is drawn into one organized system by the unity at the source.
The principle may be illustrated from the different classes of animal life: there is one genus, horse, though horses among themselves fight and bite and show malice and angry envy: so all the others within the unity of their Kind; and so humanity.
All these types, again, can be ranged under the one Kind, that of living things; objects without life can be thought of under their specific types and then be resumed under the one Kind of the "non-living"; if we choose to go further yet, living and non-living may be included under the one Kind, "Beings," and, further still, under the Source of Being.